Dust-to-Digital: Re-packaging the world’s most overlooked musics

The artfully constructed box set for Goodbye, Babylon. Photo courtesy Dust-Digital.com.

The past requires continuous re-invention. Given a few decades of inattention, history slides over the horizon, and it is as if it had never been. Texts that spoke to whole generations turn into proverbially dusty tomes, and songs that once excited record buyers disappear into attics.

So acts of passionate rediscovery such as Atlanta’s Dust-to-Digital are particularly worthy of celebration. It is entirely appropriate that the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center shop should stock the bulk of Dust-to-Digital’s backlist, since the enterprise founded in 2004 by Lance Ledbetter has re-contextualized the previous century and a half of sound and related image recording for the present one. It doesn’t so much hand on a legacy as it creates one.

Anyone who doubts this has only to look at the re-invention of the box set that started it all. Goodbye, Babylon has an air of excess appropriate to the year in which Susan Archie designed it; a cedar box with slide-out cover and raw cotton inside makes for an expensive but utterly memorable context for the comprehensive contents—six CDs and a 200-page book. It was and is a professional re-presentation of forgotten music that needed to make a spectacular entry into the tight market of contemporary audience attention. The South’s aural legacy has seldom if ever been packaged so experimentally.

Cover for Melodii Tuvi. Courtesy Dust-Digital.com.

Having leapt over the competition in terms of innovation, Dust-to-Digital could afford to fall back on conventional CD design for successive releases, though it also reached out to niche markets in doing so. Re-releasing the Russian Melodii Tuvi reached far outside the realm of Southern music, but it automatically won the gratitude of a diverse group of enthusiasts of Richard Feynman’s quest to answer the question, “Whatever happened to Tannu Tuva?” (It also provided an oblique link to Atlanta’s multi-leveled involvement with Central Asian culture, as represented by Emory University’s Emory-Tibet partnership (which this month has a thangka painter in residence on the Emory campus) and Oglethorpe University Museum of Art’s numerous past presentations of the arts of Tibet and of Mongolia.)

In point of fact, Dust-to-Digital’s list of interests says nothing about “Southern” and almost forgets to mention “music” (“Our Focus: Culture, Traditions, History, Folklore, Religion, Myths, Symbols, Language, Stories, Genealogy, Rituals, Songs, Legends, Proverbs, Technology, Identity”). Black Mirror: Reflections in Global Musics, a compilation by Ian Nagoski with tracks from as far afield as Laos and the Hutsul culture of Ukraine indicates the range of Dust-to-Digital’s cultural interests. Entire symposia could be devoted to issues raised by the diverse musics gathered on this single CD, and I presume they have.

The redoubtable Art Rosenbaum’s Art of Field Recording returns Dust-to-Digital to home territory, in award-winning fashion. Rosenbaum has combined a career as a noted painter and art professor with one as performer and documentarian of traditional American music that proves that traditions find ways of persisting longer than one would have thought possible.

The explorations and re-interpretations go on. Luc Sante contributes an essay to a book of photographs from the collection of Jim Linderman released with accompanying CD under the title Take Me to the Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography, 1890-1950. Despite its historical focus, the compilation helps to contextualize a host of more recent immersion-baptism photographs exhibited by Southern artists.

Finally, Dust-to-Digital revisits vinyl with its Parlortone imprint, and does it with the most vintage recording imaginable, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s 1860 phonautogram of Au Clair de la Lune, the first known instance of intelligible recorded sound.

Though I’ve handled copies of them, I’ve actually heard only a small portion of Dust-to-Digital’s output; if nothing else, financial limitations would keep me from acquiring their backlist. The elegance of their offerings as physical objects is the conclusive factor, but the importance of Dust-to-Digital would be clear enough just from a perusal of the discs’ track titles.

Obviously Dust-to-Digital is as globally available as anything else in the internet era, and questions can be directed to info@dust-digital.com if the website doesn’t address them.

A well-known critic, poet, and ART PAPERS staff member, Dr. Jerry Cullum has been a keen observer of the metro Atlanta scene for decades.